review of
A. Bertram Chandler's Book 2 in the Saga of Commodore John Grimes: "The Inheritors" & "Gateway to Never"
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 31, 2016

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/518842-cat-s-pajamas

I just finished a review of Book 3 of this Saga in which I devoted much of my writing to trying to tie together the many inter-related Grimes (etc) stories, that I've haphazardly consumed, into a coherent linear narrative. That was fun. The reader is encouraged, nay, demanded, nay, forced at imaginary laser pistol point to read it, in totum, here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/518236-rim-dimensions .

The Inheritors is dedicated thusly: "For my favorite aelurophobe". Wiktionary informs me that aelurophobe is an alternate spelling for the apparently more commonly used "ailurophobe" wch is a "person with an irrational fear or hatred of felines." ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ailurophobe#English ) The word is obscure enuf so that the reader isn't really tipped off about the humor of the story it precedes. Nearer the end we get: "perhaps Morrow was an aelurophile" (p 161) wch is, of course, a cat-lover rather than a cat-fearer.

As usual, Grimes has a mission:

"We have reason to believe that there is a humanoid—or possibly human—settlement on the fourth planet of this system. Should this settlement exist it is probable that it is a hitherto undiscovered Lost Colony. You are reminded that your duties are merely to conduct an investigation, and that you are not, repeat not, to interfere in the internal affairs of the colony." - p 5

I'd already read-tell of this planet from reading The Far Traveler (1977) written as a quasi-sequel of sorts to The Inheritors (1972). SO, the inter-relationships just keep on coming. Chandler has Grimes mention Kipling:

"He paused, then delivered his own quotation. " 'Transportation is civilization.' "

""All right," she said at last. "Who wrote that?"

""Kipling."

""Kipling—and science fiction?"

""You should catch up on your own reading some time. . . ."" - p 21

Welllllllll, it just so happens that I HAVE READ Kipling's science fiction & have even reviewed it on this here newfangled GoodReads thingamajig:

"This 1st story, again, reminds me of Poe - but the 2nd & 3rd stories use anthropomorphosis of machines to make technical description more entertaining - & I don't think Poe wd've done that:

"""Good business," said the high-pressure cylinder. "Whack her up, boys. They've given us five pounds more steam"; and he began humming the first bars of "Said the Young Obadiah to the Old Obadiah," which, as you may have noticed, is a pet tune among engines not built for high speed. Racing liners with twin-screws sing "The Turking Patrol" and the overture to the "Bronze Horse," and "Madame Angot," till something goes wrong, and then they render Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette," with variations.

"""You'll learn a song of your own some fine day," said the Steam, as he flew up the foghorn for one last bellow." (p 27)" - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/443932.The_Science_Fiction_Stories_of_Rudyard...

SO, there's something vaguely relevant to what Grimes quotes.

Drongo Kane makes an appearance again as the bad guy. The back cover of the bk states "DRONGO KANE NEVER BROKE THE LAW He was a cunning ruthless opportunist who paid when he had to and stole when he could". According to the 1st result in a Google search:

"Australian Slang. 1. a stupid or slow-witted person; simpleton. Origin Expand. 1920-25; probably to be identified with drongo, as a name for the Australian bird Dicrurus bracteata; though often popularly alleged to have originated from the name of an unsuccessful racehorse of the 1920s."

Alas, Drongo Kane is definitely venal to an extreme but not a simpleton or he wdn't be able to be so diabolical.

""I hope that Drongo Kane is bound for Morrowvia, Captain."

""Why, Mr. Saul?" Grimes essayed a feeble jest. "Two's company, three's a crowd."

""Racial hatreds die very hard, Captain. To my people, for many, many years, 'slaver' has been as especially dirty word. Ganda, as you know, was colonized by my people. . . . And some hundreds of them, rescued by Kane's Southerly Buster before their sun went nova, were sold by him to the Duke of Waldegren. . . ."

""As I said before," Grimes told him, "they weren't sold. They entered the duke's service as indentured labor."" - pp 28-29

Of course, Grimes really knows what's what. He's putting a fine point on things but he knows that Kane's a slaver. To quote from Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker's excellent The Many-Headed Hydra:

"Many indentured servants, Thomas Verney explained in 162, came from the "bridewells, and the prisons." - p 58, The Many-Headed Hydra

"John Donne promised in a sermon of 1622 that the Virginia Company "shall sweep your streets, and wash your dores, from idle persons["]" [..] "He wanted America to function as a prison, and for many it did."

[..]

"Of the several hundreds of children shipped to Virginia at this time," [1619] "the names of 165 were recorded. By 1625 only twelve of those were still alive; the other 153, or 93 percent, had died." - p 59, The Many-Headed Hydra

"Indentured servitude" my ass. That's what known as a euphemism. Work Will Make You Free Trade. In The Far Traveler:

"The Baroness, Grimes's temporary employer, finds an affinity w/ Kane, a completely unscrupulous character who Grimes keeps foiling:

"""Did Mr. Delamere and his family come with you, Captain Danzellan?" asked Grimes. "Call them up, and we'll wet the baby's head!"

""And Kane exclaimed, "You can break the bottle of champagne over it if you want to!"

""The Baroness laughed as he raised her hand. "Quite an interesting character, this Captain Kane. A rogue, obviously, but . . ."

"""Mphm," grunted Grimes." - p 121"

I don't really consider slavers to be "rogues", they're business-as-usual types who become Barons & Baronesses when they continue to get away w/ their crimes.

Chandler has Grimes be a man-after-my-own-flesh, insofar as pro-nudism is a recurring theme:

"That all of them were unclothed was no indication of their cultural level—naturism was the rule rather than the exception on several highly civilized planets, such as Arcadia." - p 51

The naturist society under observation here is that of Morrowvia, the formerly lost colony, now found. Indeed, they're my idea of civilized, wch, unfortunately, doesn't jive w/ any civilization on Earth that I know of, insofar as they don't fight each other: "["]But to fight each other . . . unthinkable!"" - p 81 Good luck w/ that. The USA, the country where I live, has been at continuous war for all 63 yrs that I've been alive.

Dagnabbit-all-to-heck they're so civilized there's not even any pollution:

"Some of the airmen, Maya said, were wanting to fit their clumsy, unmaneuverable craft with engines—but Morrow (he must have been quite a man, this Morrow, thought Grimes) had warned his people, shortly before his death, of the overuse of machinery.

"He had said (Maya quoted), "I am leaving you a good world. The land, the air and the sea are clean. Your own wastes go back into the soil and render it more fertile. The wastes of the machines will pollute everything—the sky, the sea and the very ground you walk upon. Beware of the machine. It pretends to be a good servant—but the wages it exacts are far too high."" - p 86

Did you know that Andy Warhol's father died from sickness contracted from drinking contaminated/polluted water at a construction site he was working on? Imagine that there was a time when you cd take a walk & drink from a spring w/o fear of toxins. That wasn't that long ago. I'D LIKE THAT TIME BACK AGAIN IN MY LIFETIME.

But there are always the Drongo Kanes of the world to shit everything up by pushing susceptible people's egos out of control by things like 21 gun salutes:

"Surely not, thought Grimes dazedly. Surely not. A twenty-one gun salute for somebody who, even though she is called a queen, is no more than the ma[y]or of a small town. . . ." - p 121

To again quote my The Far Traveler review:

"One of the reasons the Baroness likes Kane, the slaver, is that he kisses-royalty's-ass - something that Grimes is too ingenuous to do:

""Kane was first out of the leading dinghy, throwing a hitch of the painter around a wooden bollard. Gallantly he helped the Baroness from the boat to the low jetty." - p 136" - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1675264100

""That you, Mr. Saul? Keep your eyes open for any activities around Southerly Buster. Kane has just sent a message to his ship. It must be a code. Just one word. Blackbird."

""Blackbird . . ." repeated Saul. Then, "Have I your permission to use force?"

""What are you talking about, Saul?"

""Operation Blackbird, Captain. Didn't you know that blackbirding was a euphemism for slave trading?"" - p 131, The Inheritors

Yet-another Google search yields this as its 1st entry:

"Blackbirding is the coercion of people through trickery and kidnapping to work as labourers. From the 1860s, blackbirding ships in the Pacific sought workers to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands in Peru."

Righto. I doubt that anybody uses that slang anymore but it's good to know. "[T}rickery and kidnapping to work as labourers" is what's building wealthy cities like Dubai, United Arab Emirates, now isn't it?!:

"Dubai and similar petro-dollar based Arab states know that the only way they can attract so many slaves is to offer them slightly more "salaries" than they get paid in their home countries which are already poverty stricken. They do not have any concept of minimum-living-wage in these Arab countries.

"They get paid $100-$200 on average. Not enough for groceries, let alone having a one bedroom for themselves to sleep in peace. Their reality is very grim, and the conditions they have to work in are very harsh and wretched." - https://www.quora.com/To-what-degree-has-Dubai-been-built-by-slave-labor

"A 2006 NPR report quoted Baya Sayid Mubarak, the Indian consul for labor and welfare in Dubai, as saying "the city's economic miracle would not be possible without armies of poorly paid construction workers from the Indian sub-continent". The NPR report stated that foreign construction workers lived "eight and ten to a room in labor camps" and that "many are trapped in a cycle of poverty and debt, which amounts to little more than indentured servitude.""

[..]

"The BBC has reported that "local newspapers often carry stories of construction workers allegedly not being paid for months on end. They are not allowed to move jobs and if they leave the country to go home they will almost certainly lose the money they say they are owed." Additionally, some of the workers have allegedly been forced to give up their passports upon entering Dubai, making it difficult to return home." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai

The González sisters in Mexico used it:

"Delfina and María de Jesús González (known as "Las Poquianchis") were two sisters from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, located 200 miles north of Mexico City. From the 1950s until the mid-1960s the sisters ran Rancho El Ángel, called the "bordello from hell" in San Francisco del Rincón.

"The police picked up a woman named Josefina Gutiérrez, a procuress, on suspicion of kidnapping young girls in the Guanajuato area, and during questioning, she implicated the two sisters. Police officers searched the sisters' property and found the bodies of 11 men, 80 women and several fetuses, a total of over 91.

"Investigations revealed the scheme was that they would recruit prostitutes through help-wanted ads; though the ads would state the girls would become maids for the two sisters. Many of the girls were force fed heroin or cocaine. The sisters killed the prostitutes when they became too ill, damaged by repeated sexual activity, lost their looks or stopped pleasing the customers.

"They would also kill customers who showed up with large amounts of cash. When asked for an explanation for the deaths, one of the sisters reportedly said, "The food didn't agree with them." Tried in 1964, the González sisters were each sentenced to 40 years in prison. In prison, Delfina died due to an accident, and Maria finished her sentence and dropped out of sight after her release.

"Although they are often cited as the killers, there were two other sisters who helped in their crimes, Carmen and Maria Luisa. Carmen died in jail due to cancer; Maria Luisa went mad because she feared that she would be killed by angry protesters. The sisters were the subject of the 1977 book Las Muertas by Mexican author Jorge Ibargüengoitia." - http://murderpedia.org/female.G/g/gonzalez-sisters.htm

Ah, yes, sisterly solidarity. It's a good thing only men are capable of violence & treachery or this world wd be an even bigger mess.. Uhhhhhh.. Note that Maria was released from prison despite her involvement in 91 murders. Anyway, the term blackbirding might not be in use anymore but the practice is still highly appealing to the unscrupulous. Watch out.

The expression "catting around" appeared in my review of The Far Traveler: ""["]My Second Officer—among others—did some tom catting around["]" & I'll bet you can't give me one good reason why more such expressions shdn't be quoted from The Inheritors: "She was purring." (p 156) "Dog tired," (p 157)

"["]Not unless you can pull a rabbit out of a hat."

""Not a rabbit," she told him. "Most definitely not a rabbit."" - p 157

"["]It took me hours after I was able to get my paws on the records. . . ."" - p 167

The term "subhumans" was used to great effect by nazis to justify crimes against humanity. Chandler explores this deeply in The Inheritors:

"["]They manufactured, in their laboratories, androids—beings of synthetic flesh and blood that were, in effect, artificial men and women. Then they made 'underpeople'; the word coined by a Twentieth Century science fiction writer called Cordwainer Smith and later, much later, used in actual fact. These underpeople were even less human than the androids, their very appearance making obvious their animal origins.["]" - p 160

Leave it to SF to imagine such things & the seemingly inevitable social consequences.

As Grimes & Co uncover the history of Morrowvia they learned about its founder, Morrow:

"["]Evidently he disapproved of the nudity taboo, just as Commander Lazenby's people do on Arcadia. His political ideas bordered on anarchism. Possibly he was an anarchist. I seem to recall from my reading of history that there was quite a powerful, ir influential, Anarchist Party on Earth, in both hemispheres, at the time of the Second Expansion. It worked underground, and it contributed to the decline and fall of the Russian Empire. And we see here the results of Morrow's ideas. Utterly unselfconscious nudism, no central government, no monetary system. . . ." - p 163

Given that I, this here reviewer, am an anarchist, it was Chandler's references to Anarchism that attracted my attn in the 1st place. The Anarch Lords was the 1st bk I read by him. Here's an excerpt from my review of that:

"Back to Liberia, the planet, in Chandler's The Anarch Lords:

""Suffice it to say that the original colonists, the idealistic Anarchists, after a bad start during which their settlement almost perished, became devotees of the goddess Laura Norder . . ." (I'd better laugh, thought Grimes, to keep the old bastard in a good mood.) "Their numbers increased and eventually they were able to exercise control over their environment. There was a resurgence of Anarchism and armed revolt against the authorities. The president—he was more of a dictator, actually—appealed for help to the Federation. After the mess had been more or less cleaned up it was decided that the Liberians would be far happier if governed by an outsider, somebody whom everybody, right, left and center, could hate." - p 9

"It's funny, I haven't personally been accused of being an 'idealist' in a long time. Have I become accepted as a 'realist' or has that old criticism of anyone who wants to change things in a way that they consider to be more fair & more liberating become obsolete itself? Whatever the case, reading mention of "idealistic Anarchists" has a familiar feel to it." - “Taking the “Lords”.. ..out of Anarchy”: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/442383-taking-the-lords

The Inheritors is from 1972 & The Anarch Lords is from 1981. he seems to've become somewhat (but not completely) disillusioned w/ anarchism in the intervening yrs. So much for The Inheritors. Chandler belongs up there w/ Philip José Farmer's Strange Relations etc..

******************************************

Moving on to "Gateway to Never": Chandler's excellent at infusing each new bk, each new installment of the Grimes Saga, w/ substantially new ideas - not always, but often, carrying a subtext of social/philosophical commentary. In this case, he tackled what I, at least, consider to be a tricky subject: illegal drugs - usually the ones consumed for the individual's private or small social circle pleasures or psycho-exploration.

In my probably not very popular opinion, the society I live in is entirely too dependent on drugs - both legal & illegal. I've eschewed medicinal legal drugs most of my life -preferring to allow my body's own defense system to do its job as best it can as much as possible. I've tried many of the illegal drugs, mostly preferring the ones I associate w/ consciousness expansion but trying others that I now wd consider much too destructive & addictive. I've never been a drug addict of any kind - not even addicted to alcohol - wch I've probably abused more than most things.

In the USA, the government has certainly been connected to the heroin & the crack business - for all the usual greed & control reasons. As such, it's as despicable as ever that poor people - &, yes, it's usually poor people - get put in prison for abusing these drugs. It's all a slaving racket from my POV: create vampiric ghettos of no-opportunity, pump addictive drugs into them, penalize people caught using them, use them as slave labor in prisons. It's all business-as-usual: a few make massive profits while the many suffer great despair.

Making things even more complicated is that drugs like LSD, mushrooms, mescaline, & peyote, to name a few, are generally used to have experiences that can be profound in a very positive way. SO, lumping together all illegal drugs into the same category gets ridiculous. These days, such oversimplifying is being challenged by the Medical Marijuana movement. Frankly, I'm sick of pot but that doesn't mean I want people to go to jail for using it.

Chandler has Grimes address the complexity of the illegal drug issue:

""All right. As you know very well the Rim Worlds are far less permissive than Earth and the older colonies. By comparison with them, we're practically puritanical.

""Are we? I haven't noticed anybody suffering agonies of repression." ( )

Island of Doctor Moreau updated. People crossed with cats. A lost colony. Grimes famous luck holding. Maggy Lazenby pulls his chestnuts out of the fire and he gets his gold braid and promotion to Commander.

Island of Doctor Moreau updated. People crossed with cats. A lost colony. Grimes famous luck holding. Maggy Lazenby pulls his chestnuts out of the fire and he gets his gold braid and promotion to Commander. ( )

Superficially entertaining, but one of those books where the more you think about it, the more objectionable various aspects of it turn out to be. Still, Chandler gets bonus points for the multiple tips of the hat to one of my all time favorites, Cordwainer Smith. ( )

Sample Chapters: http://webscriptions.net/chapters/0441370624/0441370624.htm